Thought
Suppression

How do you stop thinking about a white bear? It turns out that this question--asked originally by Dostoyevsky (1863) in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions--does not have an easy answer. People who are prompted to try not to think about a white bear while they are thinking out loud will tend to mention it about once a minute. Since the initial experimental studies of this phenomenon by Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White (1987), there have been many further explorations of the futility of suppression. It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. Many studies reveal that suppression may be the starting point for obsession, rather than the other way around. As a result, we end up thinking all too often about the doubts, worries, fears, and alarms that we have tried to erase from mind.